


Something To Do With You

by StarStruckMadness



Category: Smallville
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Episode Fix-it, Episode Related, Episode: s05e02 Mortal, Fix-It, M/M, Matters of the Heart, Mild Blood, Pain Kink, getting off on pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-04 22:36:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17906960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarStruckMadness/pseuds/StarStruckMadness
Summary: When Chloe comes to Clark in the aftermath of the hostage situation in S05E02 Mortal, to tell him that someone had been watching them in the Kryptonite vault, Clark sets his mind to putting an end to this so called friendship between Lex and he. Things do not go as he had planned.





	Something To Do With You

**Author's Note:**

> The scene at the end of the episode, where Clark goes to Lex to beat him to a pulp and says to him “You wanna test me? You wanna see what I’m really made of, you do it yourself, you coward.” triggered a flash of that “Fuck you! - Fuck me yourself, you coward!”-meme in me and I had to vent. Hope y'all like it.

The sense of relief that flooded over him the moment it sunk in that his parents and Lana weren’t in danger any more was short lived. Chloe stood before him with a serious expression on her face, that meant she was about to tell him something he really wouldn’t like. This part of losing his powers was definitely not a benefit: first the overwhelming sense of trepidation in the vents, then that absolute feeling of impending doom while he was hanging what to him seemed to be a hundred feet above any solid ground surface, and afterwards the sharp pain of the security lasers singeing his skin. These sensations he wouldn’t mind being gone again. He could deal with sweating and being slow and sore from working his ass off, like any other normal human. But the knot coiling in his gut at the seriousness on Chloe’s face he could definitely do without. The intro of “I’m not the one you should worry about” was a painful pointer in the direction his mind usually wandered to when really anybody said those words to him these days. A vision of a stormy grey gaze flashed before his inner eye.

Chloe sighed that damning sigh: “I traced the carrier signal I picked up in the vault. I found a second layer of video feed hidden in the frequency. Someone was watching us.” Just who she might have thought that someone was, she didn’t say. She didn’t have to.

Clark felt his blood boil. He heard the grind of his teeth against each other as he forcefully clenched his jaw. Emotions were nothing new to him, he had them even with his powers. Still, what Chloe implied felt like what he would imagine was experiencing a sixteen wheeler hitting you at full speed. And that was an entirely different kind of pain. That saying about hope being the last one to die came to mind, but right now he was feeling like getting a shovel and burying it, memorial service and all.

So that was it. This was the end of the rope. Stuff of legends, his ass. No one would remember their friendship, they didn’t even have the time to become legendary. Lex had made sure of that. Dwelling on the past, trying to uncover every little bit of his existence, just because he couldn’t respect his privacy, having him investigated, spying on him. For fucks sake, Lex was the master of having secrets, his whole being was a secret, his secrets had secrets. Why was it so hard for him to accept that other people had them, too?

“I have to go take care of something”, he said to his parents and Lana. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.” He saw on his parents faces that they’d gathered from his tone not to ask any questions. And when they didn’t, Lana didn’t, either. He could see how she physically kept herself from opening up her mouth, seemingly swallowing all her questions with an audible gulp. Chloe just looked at him in a way that told him not to call for more trouble. As if he did that _on purpose_.

With a huff he made a break for the door and as soon as he was outside he kept going, forgetting for a moment that he wasn’t as fast as he’d used to be. Good thing the keys to the truck were still in his jeans pocket.

As if in a blur that was worse than what the world looked like while he was super speeding his ways around Smallville, he found himself sitting in his truck in front of the mansion front door, not having a clue as to how he even drove himself there. His hands were still gripping the wheel, knuckles white and his fingers coming full circle around it to bury his nails in the pad of his thumbs. Landing in the moment at that time meant realizing two things. First, how the wheel hadn’t splintered in his steel grip and second, the fact that he seemed to be hurting himself and feeling it. And yet, even without his powers and without any red Kryptonite around to affect him, he was most certainly seeing red. In a way he was grateful again, that he didn’t need to restrain his powers at that point of time.

Getting out of the truck and slamming the door as hard as he could, he was bewildered to find even that insignificant gesture of unnecessary violence felt oddly liberating, like turning a vent and letting out the pressure. He planted his feet, still staring at the truck that hadn’t somersaulted away at his aggression, felt the gravel underneath the soles of his shoes shift ever so minutely after every single micro movement of his body and took a cleansing breath that did nothing to center him. Out of some ridiculous sense of needing to demonstrate his powers he found himself wanting them back. Then, in the next instant, as he made his way to the door of the pretentious castle, he looked back at the truck that still was standing there, and thought that maybe, just maybe, not being able to kill someone with a simple slap to their face was probably a good thing at the moment.

The red haze around his vision zeroed in on the object of his fury. There, on the desk on the far end of the study from where he was standing, sat hunched over the person who he had believed to be his best friend, had hoped that he still was, wanted to believe that Chloe had maybe been wrong about her unspoken assumption for once in her life.

“This is impossible.” When Clark heard the words come out of Lex’s mouth, they seemed to shatter every single last illusion he had been holding on to. The last shovelful of earth on the grave of his hope. Dead. Dead and buried to never rise again!

"Disappointed?” He couldn’t keep the disdain from his voice, almost choking on the word that so sharply tasted of dirt.

“Clark! I heard what happened. Is everyone alright?” The fucker still thought Clark would buy it! How stupid did Lex actually think him to be?! Oh, he wanted this to hurt!

The punch to Lex’s face felt like jumping into a cooling pool of water on an unbearably hot summer day – needing the cooling but knowing the shock from the change of temperature could cause a heart attack. Of course, Clark would still take the plunge.  Seeing Lex knocked on the floor was like breaking through the surface of the water and taking the first breath after a dive that might have been a tad too long.

When he looked up, Clark could see his nose bleeding. “What are you doing?” He seemed genuinely taken aback by the sudden onslaught of violence in Clark’s demeanor.

“What I should've done a long time ago.” Picking Lex up off the floor, Clark couldn’t stop himself from thinking how he never noticed Lex’s weight before. He’d always assumed that Lex weighed next to nothing, what with his lithe frame and all, even to the average human. But having him in his now very non-alien-powered grip, Clark could see that Lex wasn’t lithe at all. Slim maybe, but still toned. Blinking once, twice, he refocused on the matter at hand.

“Chloe traced the video feed from Level 3. You were watching us the whole time.” He could feel his jaw tremble. Looking deeply into Lex’s grey eyes he was desperately searching for a truthful answer, a denial of what he had just said, implied, accused Lex of.

Instead there was that faux innocence, that apparent nescience in the stone cold concrete pools that he had once been so enamored with. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

Throwing him down on the ground and Lex landing but a few feet away, Clark couldn’t help but be thankful for the absence of his powers yet again, else Lex would have probably crashed through the wall and into the next room. There was a certain satisfaction Clark savored from the way Lex was crawling on the floor, trying and failing to straighten up.

“She also pulled the security records from Belle Reve. You were there the day those psychos escaped! You helped them somehow, didn't you?” And still there was a part of him that rejected the obvious truth that wanted to hear Lex deny all of those things. Because, no matter the levels of obsession he came to expect from Lex, Clark simply didn’t want to acknowledge that he would go as far as endangering his family. In the silence of what Lex ultimately wasn’t denying, he heard that damn shovel being thrown in the back of a pick-up truck. His hopes funeral would end with the clichéd scene of him still standing at its grave in the rain, getting wet to the bones.

“What'd you promise them, Lex? Enough serum to last the rest of their lives?” He was pissed! He felt like he should add the Trademark sign at the very end of that word.

“You're being irrational.” Oh, so from feigning ignorance and blatantly lying to him, Lex had now gone over to berating him. Somehow, pissed™ wasn’t cutting it anymore.

“This whole thing was a set up. A test!” Well, at least now Clark knew that by not denying it, Lex was for the first time in the past few moments honest with him.

“And to do it, you put Lana and my family in danger.” He hauled out to strike Lex again. He really wanted this to hurt! Not even Lex’s panic stricken expression could make him lower his fist. “Clark!”

“No!” He wouldn’t listen to this bullshit anymore. The punch stung in his knuckles, making him wonder how much it had hurt Lex and trying to picture his disfigured face in the morning.

“I thought we could start over, Lex, but you're too obsessed with the past.” The seemingly endless amount of lies Clark had had to serve him since the very moment of their first meeting rose up in his throat burning like bile almost making him retch. “But, I’m different now and I’m through playing games with you.” Through feeding his obsessions, indulging him, maybe even egging him on, with how reckless Clark had sometimes been around Lex. And all in the hopes of possibly not having to hide from him. His hope was buried now in a fresh grave he stood in front of in the rain, soaked through, clichéd black and white scene, raindrops on his face undiscernible from eventual tears and all.

“You wanna test me? You wanna see what I’m really made of, you do it yourself, you coward.”

Clark hauled out for another punch, trying to get a rise out of him, making his instincts kick in and fight back. Huh, Lex had become predictable to him. Maybe he had subconsciously known that this friendship was doomed from the start. Lex expertly managed to block his incoming fist and punched him in the face. He felt the pain in his cheek like a blooming flower, the oscillation of a shockwave, spreading from somewhere in the middle of his lower jaw to the rest of his face. The tangy copper taste was new. The sight of blood on his hand after wiping the back of it against the corner of his lips oddly satisfying. He did manage to get a rise out of the always so balanced young billionaire.

Lex’s eyes wandered from his bloody hand to the crimson drops on his mouth. Shock was written on his face. Maybe now it would sink in that there was no mystery to be solved about Clark Kent. Not that there never had been. His now absent powers were just conveniently corroborating every single little lie, white or not, he had ever uttered in front of Lex in order to keep his secret safe. 

“Satisfied?” He couldn’t hide the smugness in his voice, didn’t want to, relished the moment when finally he was the one to smirk at Lex and not the other way around. Still, he’d preferred it be in another setting with another background, where the story wouldn’t have been so overall craptastic and where the smirk wouldn’t have been so detrimental to an eventual rest of a relationship, whatever its nature, between them.

When he went to make his way out and back to his family, he was stopped by an iron grip on his wrist. Was this how humans experienced his touch? He turned to face Lex and the moment he did, he felt the ground underneath his feet shift. Falling while actually standing frozen in place was also one of those sensations he wasn’t quite fond of, he decided. It felt somewhat like dangling off a very unstable vent a hundred feet above the ground. Lex’s eyes were hypnotizing, the tears in them reflecting the flickering of the flames in the fire place like ever changing constellations.

Clark couldn’t move, didn’t even flinch when Lex reached out with his left hand to gently touch the drop of blood on his lips. As if in a trance he watched Lex study what he had picked up on his thumb, scrutinizing eyes assessing the possibility of it actually being blood. When Lex popped the bloodied thumb in his mouth and closed his eyes at the taste, Clark blinked for the first time in probably an entire minute. Still afraid of what conclusion Lex might come to from the taste of what was his equivalent to human blood, Clark thanked every deity he had ever heard of or read about that it at least had the typical copper taste. What really threw him off kilter was the low moan and the long exhalation that followed the blood tasting.

And then his head was being pulled in, Lex reaching out, this time with his mouth, to directly lick at the remnants of blood on the corner of Clark’s mouth. And then into it, since Clark had apparently been out to catch flies. The kiss wasn’t soft, it was hungry, greedy, like a beast unleashed. As if something had unraveled itself from Lex’s self-restraint and granted him the permission to finally, _finally_ , after years of desperate waiting and hoping against hope (Damn! How had Lex’s hope survived this entire ordeal?!) plunder his mouth in a searing kiss that Clark could feel physically burning him from the inside out. This sensation he could get on board with.

Yet, his conscious mind seemed to come online, albeit slowly and only bit by bit, but he still found the necessary portion of rationale to push Lex away, much too gently for his own liking and not nearly far enough. Wiping his mouth would have been a command that should have come from a, at that moment, still dormant part of his brain.

“What the hell are you doing, Lex?!” The alert center of his brain was taking a vacation, apparently, since his voice was too soft and his words too serene in light of recent events. With his hands still on Lex’s shoulders from when he had pushed him away, he ducked his head a little to try and look at Lex’s now slightly downturned face.

The determination he saw in the quicksilver orbs when Lex faced him again, knocked the wind out of him. “What _I_ should have done a long time ago.”

And with that Lex was on him again, kissing him with abandon, as if there would be no tomorrow and the world’s end was imminent. Maybe it was, Clark’s world certainly was crumbling to ashes at the sheer bruising force that Lex put into the kisses. And this time his entire cognitive system seemed to have shut down, because Clark was not only letting this happen but was enjoying returning the attack on his mouth.

Clark found that he didn’t necessarily need super speed to make it seem like time had stopped. Lex was able to do that, too. When his back collided with the frame of the study’s double doors, he managed to detach himself from Lex’s demanding mouth and look him in the eyes, glazed over with something Clark couldn’t but identify as relief with a hint of wonder.

“Lex.” His voice was but a rasp and his eyes defocused again, sight blurring, making Lex’s face swim a little bit. The slap to his face was unexpected, but it made his eyes regain their focus and landing on Lex’s face he found the young billionaire blissfully grinning. The stinging pain in his cheek seemed to be getting warmer by the second and Lex wonderingly watched as it probably reddened. “What was that for?” he asked, voice a little bit more substantial.

“I can hurt you.” It was little more than a maniacal whisper, and yet it didn’t seem to faze Clark much. Lex being able to hurt him didn’t initiate a fight or flight response. Then again, his brain was taking a break. Coincidentally, in his imagination, Clark saw himself still standing at his hope’s grave, but the rain had stopped.

Lex’s hands had a steel grip on his flannel shirt, pulling him onto his lips again. This kiss, still hungry, but also languid, liberated, relaxed, not yet lazy, but at least unhurried, made Clark sigh into Lex’s mouth and he could feel the subsequent smile that spread the lips on his. Kissing while walking up the stairs proved to be a feat none of both were capable of at that very moment, so Lex pulled back with a wet smack against Clarks lips, standing two steps above him, finally for once having the height advantage, and still with that maniacal grin grabbed a fistful of Clarks shirt again and made for the upper floor. And even if Lex’s hand hadn’t been dragging him upstairs by his blue plaid shirt he’d have gone himself, following him like a hungry stray that had forgotten what food tasted like and Lex had promised him more of what he’d only given him a taste of by now.

Brain still conveniently offline, Clark relished the cheerful giggle that escaped Lex’s grinning mouth as he’d thrown Clark onto the bed and he’d unceremoniously bounced once before settling on the cool silken sheets. Much too slowly for Clarks liking, Lex started unbuttoning his wine red shirt, while grinning at him, watching him with a sultry gaze through his lashes. When the shirt finally fell to the floor, pooling behind Lex’s legs like a giant wine stain on the plush sheep skin rug at the foot of the bed, he seemed to have had enough of the wait and made short work of his belt and pants, which he straight-out let drop to his ankles and simply stepped out of them and onto the bed, straddling Clarks hips.

Clark, propped up on his elbows, didn’t see the slap to his right cheek coming. Lex’s grin, on the other hand, he was absolutely expecting. “Pain, Lex? That’s your kink, really?” It was kind of trite.

The widening of Lex’s grin, the sheer width his mouth could stretch to, made Clark rethink if it had been so ludicrous of Lionel to have his son institutionalized. Yet, fear he didn’t experience at the sight. Not even slight unease. “No.” The drawn out syllable slid against Clark’s skin like the silk beneath him. “Causing _you_ pain is.” Not a single alarm went off in Clark’s head at that announcement, no siren, not even a tinkling cow bell. The only sound he did perceive was his own gravelly voice groaning as Lex assaulted his mouth once again.

Clark, collapsing back onto the bed with Lex following him without any interruption whatsoever, found his hands free to roam the plains of Lex’s back, his long fingers dancing gently on the pearlescent skin, tickling his sides, tracing the lightly defined abdominal muscles where his hands brushed against Lex’s as he was unbuttoning Clark’s flannel shirt, then taking the same route back again until he splayed his hands on Lex’s shoulder blades. This time going lower, skirting the seam of his black boxer briefs, fingertips slipping underneath it and pressing into the plump flesh of Lex’s glutes.

With a moan at the touch Lex moved his mouth to Clark’s jaw, his chin, the column of his stretched neck as he had thrown his head back in pleasure at Lex’s ministrations. When he had finally unbuttoned the last button and shoved the coarse material to the side, even off Clarks shoulders, he latched onto the skin in the dip of Clarks collar bone and sucked, hard and unrelenting, until after a while he let off with a plop to take a long look at his little purple masterpiece. With a satisfied grin he dove back in only to lick over it and make his way to the part of Clark’s neck where it met his shoulder. Clark’s little unassuming self had given himself over to the pleasure and couldn’t help the gasping shout that escaped his mouth when Lex bit into his skin with fervor, clearly out to cause his willing farm boy pain.

“Louder.” Clark wasn’t even sure he had hurt right with how much of that word seemed to have drowned in a pant. But when he didn’t let out a sound at the next bite, Lex straightened up, threw him a dark look and slapped him yet again, the sound echoing in the silent bedroom. “Louder, I said.” Clark could do little but nod. And when Lex subsequently dove for another bite, this time at his shoulder, he knew to let out and unhinged yell at the sharp pain of teeth on his skin.

The next flash of pain came from a little lower, where Lex’s right hand had seconds ago caressed his left nipple and was now painfully twisting it between thumb and forefinger. “Aah! Lex, ease up a bit, would you?!” Lex then licked up a stripe from Clarks shoulder to his ear only to bite at the soft flesh of the earlobe. “What if I don’t wanna?” he panted.

“Well, then it’s time you understood that you can’t always do what you want.” Clark tried to go for stern, but it kind of lost its effect when he had to gasp mid-sentence at Lex nibbling on his jaw. “What? You gonna stop me, farm boy?” He ended the sentence aggressively pinching Clarks right nipple and eliciting another shout from him, long and loud, with a hiss at the end like a budding fire sizzling. “Didn’t think so.” Clark could literally hear the smirk on his lips.

With deft fingers Lex unbuttoned Clark’s jeans and moved to pull them down Clark’s thighs. Then, without further ado he simply shoved his right hand in Clark’s boxers and gripped his clearly very hard dick. And not in a gentle fashion. The tight grip had Clark hissing and groaning, restraining himself from coming right then and there. Who woulda thunk? He was getting off on pain, too, what with never having felt any and all that. In his imagination, he was looking up at the now sunny skies above the grave his hope had been laid to rest in and his imaginary version of himself shrieked very girlishly when looking back down at the fresh earth of the new grave he found a hand and forearm to be suddenly protruding out of it. The bitch had come back to life and was trying to resurface.

The images before his inner eye bid their farewell when his dick got engulfed in a wet hot mouth. Lex’s wet hot mouth, to be precise. As his inner home cinema had apparently broken down, he found himself propping his upper body up on his elbows again to take a good look at the bobbing bald head at his crotch. Lex was buried with his nose in Clark’s pubic hair. Clark’s last brain cell jumped off a cliff. Lex closed his eyes, moaned around Clark’s rock hard dick in his mouth and turned his gaze up to look the farm boy in the eyes. Clark came. With a shout. Without a warning. Lex swallowed.

Crawling up Clark’s body, he wrapped the nimble fingers of his left hand around Clark’s throat and squeezed very lightly. Clarks head lolled to face him and blearily blinked the haze back after the mind blowing orgasm that Lex had just given him. Not that there had been any mind left to blow. He felt the hold on his throat tighten just that little bit more, just enough to make his panting morph into a wheeze. Lex’s mouth descended upon his yet again and he was given the opportunity to taste the remnants of his own release on Lex’s tongue.

“Turn around.” Lex’s voice was soft, not a command, rather a request Clark could choose to refuse. Hi didn’t. Clark wasn’t sure he could attribute his mindless compliance to his vacationing brain anymore. Also, his hope had managed to crawl halfway out of her grave and was rearing her ugly face, tainted with dirt, blood and grime, but still she was alive. His now flaccid dick slid smoothly on the silk sheets as he, as per request, turned around and settled on his stomach, one arm awkwardly crushed beneath his torso, the other at his side. Lex settled smack dab on the middle of his ass, his hard dick rubbing up against the cleft of his ass and making Clark moan obscenely.

He was left a second to enjoy the hands softly sliding upwards from the small of his back all the way up to his shoulders, before they made their way back down, only much less gently. Lex had driven his nails into the skin of Clarks back and had dragged them painfully all the way down to his ass cheeks. The pain had made Clark groan loudly and buck his hips upwards, as if trying to shake Lex off. Lex’s subsequent hiss of “Yessss!” went straight to his dick, growing hard again.

Another unexpected slap against his cheek. His right ass cheek this time, though. At his gasp followed another, harder one that made him yap like a little puppy. And another, and another, and yet another slap followed, his reactions growing louder with every slap until he could feel his cheek burn and imagined the hue of red it must had taken on. The satisfied leer on Lex’s face as he stared at Clarks butt cheek spoke volumes of what a sight it had to be. Clark turned his face back into the sheets and groaned again for good measure.

“I can hurt you.” The tone of the slurred words made Clark believe that Lex finally understood, that Clark’s vulnerability and mortality had landed in his perception. Then Clark felt Lex freeze on top of him and turned his head back again to take a look at him. The stricken look on Lex’s face was not what he had expected. The panicked eyes locked on his were again shimmering with excess moisture. Clark managed to turn his body beneath Lex without throwing him off.

“I could hurt you.” Lex repeated, breathlessly, the subjunctive in the sentence registering in Clark’s brain. Hello, viable brain cells. How was Aruba? A tear trickled out of Lex’s left eye.

And just like that tear rolled over the edge of Lex’s lower lash line, his hope had finally managed to climb up and out over the edge of her grave. She stood there, in front of his imagined self, dusted herself of as best as she could, dirt and grime still clinging to most of her. She walked up to him, defiantly looked him in the eyes, then showed him the cold shoulder and with a very solid step began to determinedly walk away from him.

“You’re not gonna hurt me Lex.” And who was he to make such assumptions? Didn’t Lex just sic three Meteor mutants on his family? Ok, so maybe too few functioning brain cells were back at that moment for him to be rational. Where the hell was this trust coming from? How could he trust Lex with his physical integrity after everything he had put him through? The sob that escaped Lex’s throat sobered him enough to straighten up and reach for Lex, who, still in Clarks lap, curled in on himself and started crying as if a dam had broken. The mantra of “I’m sorry” he was uttering between the body wracking sobs tore at Clarks heart. The home cinema in his head flickered to life and he saw his hope striding back towards him, grabbing his hand and dragging him off into the sunset, grime and dirt and Clark’s overall wet attire included.

Clark tried to readjust himself with Lex in his lap without disturbing him too much and managed to get to the headboard of the bed to lean against it. Lex’s incessant sobbing and apologies lowered in volume but were still very much spilling from the shocked young man. Clark was hugging him to his chest, running his hand up and down his back and arm, shushing him and throwing in one or the other reassuring word in hopes of calming Lex down a bit.

When the sobbing and muttering and hiccupping had died down, and Clark was still caressing Lex’s back and arms, Lex pulled back a little to look Clark in the eyes. “I did hurt you.” The forlorn despair in his eyes felt like pin pricks on his skin, like what he would imagine it would feel like to have a large gashing wound being sewed up.

“It’s okay, Lex, nothing but a split lip and the scratches on my back can’t be that bad.” Clark still felt the drag of the nails against his skin.

When he spoke again, Lex’s voice sounded raw: “That’s not what I mean.” Oh. Oh! It was big talk time.

***

Talking with Lex had been painful on an entirely different level. Having to listen to him tell Clark of every little deceptive action he had taken towards him had felt like a far less pleasant slap to the face than the once Lex had actually administered. Having to tell him that even after all the apologies and sincerity he still couldn’t trust him entirely and witnessing the resigned nod that Lex gave him, looking up at him with bloodshot eyes from crying, was added to the top of the list of sensations he didn’t like.

Still Lex understood, hadn’t really expected anything else. But when Clark said to him that, despite what had just happened in his bedroom, he wanted to take it slow because this thing between them was a humongous work in progress, he could see the life coming back to Lex’s eyes. If his own hope had crawled out of her grave, Lex’s was crashing back down to earth in a spaceship after being exiled into the vast infinity of the universe. 

***

Three and a half hours after getting out of his truck to beat the living daylights out of Lex, he was sitting back behind the wheel on his way to Lana. The night wouldn’t end easily, that much had been sure from the moment Chloe entered their battered house. Though Clark never really imagined the night ending this way.

Parking in front of the Talon, he took another look at himself in the rear view mirror. The right side of his jaw was looking sickeningly purplish, on his throat he could discern the distinctive marks of Lex’s attempted strangulation and a bit lower a vast array of bruises from suckling too hard on his skin. Clark buttoned up his shirt to the collar. Maybe Lana wouldn’t notice everything.

“Clark, what happened?” There was genuine concern in her voice. Clark winced internally at the talk they were going to have.

“I went to say goodbye to an old friend.” The fact that it didn’t end that way he left unsaid, but he saw in Lana’s eyes that she had gathered that from the way he’d said the words. The heavy sigh on her part was just another blow to his gut. It kind of hurt more than the bruise on his face.

She tried to cover it up with a nervous chuckle. “Have you ever heard of a handshake? Come here.” She took his hand and led him to the couch, sitting in front of him and apprehensively wringing a cloth between her hands. She reached out to dab at his bloody lip and Clark started at the contact to his battered skin.

She instantly pulled back, worry marring her features. “Sorry. God, you're a mess.” And she wasn’t talking about the bruises.

Clark couldn’t look her in the eyes. Sighing in resignation seemed to be a new superpower of his. “After everything that's happened, I thought I knew what my life would be like now.” He was still seeing the picket fence, the blue skies, was still hearing the cheery voices of children and their incessant running steps and laughter. He just wasn’t seeing Lana anymore in that picture. How the hell did his world tilt on its axis so completely in a little over three hours? He left his parents’ house in a rush for blood and thanked the turn of events that he had no powers anymore lest he kill Lex with his bare hands. And now the only person he could ever imagine standing beside himself in the long run was just that very eccentric young billionaire. How were matters of the heart so irrational? One simply did not fall in love with a person that had tried to kill them. Except in Clark’s case, he wasn’t falling out of love with the person that turned out to have been trying to kill him. But had Lex really? And there was his rationale saying goodbye again.

“I thought it would be easier, but I guess you can never be certain what's gonna happen tomorrow, can you?” It sounded bland and clichéd to his own ears, and he knew instinctively that Lana wasn’t buying it either.

The smile she gave him was so devastating, that it sure felt to him like someone stabbed him. “No. No, you can't.” Now she was the one avoiding eye contact. “Just tell me one thing.” She took a deep breath, licked her lips and finally reconnected her gaze with Clarks. He could smell the salt in her unshed tears. “How did he win you over?”

Clark chuckled, lowered his head. “He hit me with his car and made me save him from drowning.”

When he dared to look up into Lana’s eyes again, he saw legitimate bewilderment in them, tears gone unshed. The following “Oh, Clark” was so full of pity, he couldn’t hide the cringe it elicited. But truth seemed to have that effect on him. Still, he couldn’t really file it away as an unpleasant sensation.


End file.
